Promised Land (10 page)

The next day was
another exceptionally heavy one for those of us who were less than fully tuned up—which was all of us except Danel. Even Micheal was beginning to show signs of stress.

Danel ploughed on with the same grim relentlessness. His feet came down hard, virtually splashing his way through the soft carpet of delicate plants. The ground was becoming more and more difficult. It was far from even, and the slopes we had to negotiate were made that much more treacherous by virtue of the fact that the vegetation crowded them and to some extent concealed their real topography. It was never possible now to pick our way around the worst of the ground cover—we had to plunge on through it whether it was ankle-deep or waist-deep. Luckily, Danel's purposeful stride took on the heaviest part of the burden of clearing a way. Max and I took it in turns to go second and make a further contribution to the comfort of those in the rear. On dropping back at one point to let Max take over, my tiredness seemed more than a little irksome because I could not see the point of Danel's insistent pace.

‘Look,' I said to Micheal, ‘he's got to slow down. We just can't move this fast as a party. Doesn't he know anything about the convoy principle? Somebody's going to come to grief soon if he doesn't stop forcing that furious pace.'

‘I've told him,' said Micheal. ‘I don't think he's listening. There's something on his mind.'

‘Great,' I said. ‘There's something on his mind. What about Mercede? Can't she persuade him to stop? She's suffering as much as anyone except Eve.' Eve, of course, was worst affected by the implacability of the pace. We'd lightened her pack somewhat, but her feet were blistered and the blisters were bursting, and there was nothing we could do about that. If we'd had medicine from the
Swan
at least she could have had stimshots to stop her caring too much, but she wouldn't trust what was on offer from the
Zodiac
kit, and I didn't blame her.

‘I don't think so,' said Micheal feebly. I realised belatedly that he was a little preoccupied himself.

Something was wrong.

‘For God's sake tell me,' I said. ‘What's he going so fast for?'

‘He wants to reach the forest people as fast as possible.'

‘Why?'

‘Before he....' Micheal searched for the words.

‘You mean he's sick,' I supplied.

‘I think so,' he said.

‘And you're sick too?'

‘Yes.'

‘Mercede?'

He shrugged uncomfortably. It was obvious that he thought they were all ill.

‘What is it?'

‘I don't know. Something we picked up in the jungle. These things are carried by parasites.'

‘You can't all have been bitten by the same bug,' I said.

He shook his head. ‘Once one of us was infected,' he said, ‘sharing the same tent...with half a hundred insects....'

I looked ahead again, at Danel's distant figure. He didn't want to be ill while he was guiding us. If all three Anacaona fell ill, we would be on our own, and with a considerable burden besides. I cursed the fact that this would probably cost us more time, but most of all I cursed our luck. It wasn't their fault, when all was said and done. I was tempted to blame the
Zodiac
people and their parsimony in the matter of equipment, but there was no point in that either.

‘Look,' I said to Micheal. ‘Tell him not to kill himself. If we can't reach the forest people, we can't. This is doing no good at all.'

But the advice came far too late. Danel was out of sight as I spoke, and as I moved forward to go after him, Eve fell. I hesitated, then called to Max to stop Danel, and went back.

She had been frightened by a spider. Not a big one, by Chao Phryan standards, but a web-spinner as big as a football. She had almost stepped on it as it had tried to scuttle across her path, turned sideways and tripped over a root. She had hurt her shin and turned her ankle. It was nothing serious and wouldn't have delayed us for more than a few moments. But by the time those few moments were over, Micheal had sunk to the ground in what appeared to be a fit of utter exhaustion, and Max had come back to us to tell us that he had been unable to stop Danel. The spiderhunter was getting farther and farther ahead of us with every moment, and on the day's form so far he would neither notice nor care that we were no longer close behind him.

‘We'd better stop,' I said.

Eve protested, but Max agreed with me. Micheal was conscious and apparently willing to go on, but he was in no fit condition. I could see no symptoms of any disease, but I hardly knew what to look for. Mercede was still apparently healthy.

Max directed Linda to make coffee and soup, while he began clearing a space where we could sit without being plagued by bugs.

‘What sort of sickness is it?' I asked Micheal. ‘Can you estimate how long it will last? Have you even any idea what effects it will have?'

But he didn't know. He wasn't a doctor. How was he supposed to know exactly what was wrong with him? Besides which, sicknesses varied in their effects. Sometimes people died, sometimes they dreamed aloud. By ‘dreaming aloud' I suspected that he meant to indicate delirium. This implied that the sickness might have a fever stage, like most of the familiar jungle diseases on Earth, and those which could affect humans on other worlds.

‘Have you got anything in that do-it-yourself witchdoctor kit that might help him?' I asked Max.

Max shook his head. ‘Don't know anything about it,' he said. ‘Can't really risk giving human medicine to a golden. After all, we don't catch the disease, so we can't really be expected to know anything about treating it.'

‘How about you, expert?' I asked Linda, with a hint of exasperated malice in my voice.

‘I don't know,' she said.

We had no alternative but to leave Micheal to Mercede, knowing that the girl was also ill and would probably not be able to help in a matter of hours.

‘Perhaps it's as well that Danel keeps going,' said Eve. ‘If he reaches the forest people he can probably get help.'

‘And if he doesn't,' I said, ‘he'll be on his own out there with no help at all for himself.'

There was an uncomfortable silence.

Nobody moved except Eve, who walked around and around in a tight circle, testing her creased ankle.

‘Well now, captain,' I said, to rub a little of my spite off on to her, ‘we seem to be in one hell of a mess now.'

She didn't react, so I looked elsewhere for a target for my asperity. But there was no point, and I soothed my bad nerves carefully.

‘Better get on the blower to home,' I suggested to Max. ‘Explain to them the geometry of the situation and tell them we need help. They can parachute somebody down through the canopy, can't they?'

‘They could,' he said. He didn't seem to think they would.

‘Tell them it's urgent,' I said. ‘A matter of life and death.'

‘I'll try,' he said.

But the people on the other end didn't seem to think that there was any effective help that they could render. They'd be pleased to drop supplies, but not doctors. They didn't have anyone who knew anything at all about Anacaon sicknesses and they didn't know anyone who did. Yes, of course they'd inquire among the Anacaona, but they weren't optimistic. They didn't think that the Anacaona treated diseases. Just rode them out or died. Max confirmed that this judgement was in accordance with his own knowledge of affairs, and so did Linda. Of course the Anacaona got sick. Everybody gets sick. But not everybody gets neurotic enough about it to try and cure the sick. Some people just take it as it comes and let it go if it will. That, apparently, was the Anacaon view of life.

‘Bloody hell,' I said, with feeling. And we all sat down to wait for night.

Micheal played his panpipes all evening. Linda and I kept him company in one tent, while Mercede was persuaded to rest in the other, with Eve watching for any sign of her getting worse. Max, we supposed, was in the other tent.

We managed to locate a whole series of minute puncture wounds on the lower part of Micheal's legs. Apparently he was quite accustomed to sharing a little of his flesh with the forest creatures while he was out here. He probably didn't even notice the bites. We washed the wounds and put bandages around his calves, but it all felt completely futile. We dared not apply anything like antiseptics or bug-killing drugs. We had no idea what effect they might have within his metabolism. We waited, and we listened to his music.

The tune he played was plaintive and highly structured. His boneless fingers flowed over the surface of the pipes, constructing chains of cadences whose complexities were explored in all combinations and every last detail. It seemed to me to be very mathematical music, lacking in the touch of magic which I felt was necessary in aesthetic appeal. But I'm no music lover, and wiser men might have deemed it brilliant for all I could tell.

I just didn't like it.

Once, as he paused, I asked him how he felt. He couldn't tell me.

‘There's nothing you can do,' he said. ‘Except wait.'

‘Would you rather Mercede was with you?' asked Linda.

‘Better not,' he said. ‘She might not have caught it.' He was fingering the pipes fluidly, and I could see that his attention was returning to them.

‘The music you play,' I said. ‘Do you remember it or do you make it up as you go along?'

He blew a couple of experimental notes.

‘I make it up,' he said. ‘That kind of song. There are some things that have to be remembered.'

‘Like the music you play for the spiders?'

He shook his head weakly. ‘Not necessarily,' be said. ‘But that music has to be played right. It has to be built properly.'

He didn't want to talk any more. He began to play again, but quietly and absently, without the meticulous attention to order that had been implicit before. He roamed across the full range of the instrument. Linda and I simply listened.

Later, I said to him: ‘Can you talk?' He had put the pipes away.

‘What do you want me to talk about?' he asked.

‘The Indris.'

He didn't seem inspired by the mention of the topic.

‘False gods,' he said, in tired tones. ‘But they were a great people.'

‘Your ancestors?'

‘Yes.'

‘In what way were they different?'

‘In many ways.'

‘This girl. You say that she might be an Indris. It's rumoured, anyhow. I've seen her, and she looked exactly like an Anacaon to me. How would I know if she was an Indris?'

‘You wouldn't,' he said, stressing the ‘you' very slightly:

‘But an Anacaon could tell?'

‘Yes.'

‘How?'

‘The difference is in the thinking. In the language.'

‘Your language?'

‘Yes.'

‘Your language inevitably reflects differences in thinking, then?'

‘That's the way it's used.'

‘That's why you never tell lies?'

‘Yes.'

‘But you don't tell lies in English, either.'

He smiled faintly. ‘English is used in a different way,' he said. ‘We never lie. But sometimes the language lies. It is the way things are said in the language.'

Linda took hold of my arm. ‘Leave him alone, can't you?' she said. ‘This isn't doing anyone any good.'

‘It's doing
me
good,' I said. ‘I'm beginning to understand why we can't understand or use their language. I'm beginning to understand why a child of English-speaking parents on New Alexandria was allowed to grow up speaking only her own language.'

‘You don't think the girl could possibly be an Indris, do you?' she asked, incredulously.

‘Maybe,' I said.

‘But the Indris are a legend,' she protested.

‘Micheal,' I said, to attract his attention again. His eyes were closed, but he was not asleep. He opened them, and looked at me somewhat reproachfully—or so I imagined.

‘One more question,' I said. ‘Did the Indris have spaceships? Did they travel between the stars?'

‘Yes,' he said.

‘It's not true,' said Linda Petrosian.

‘The Anacaona don't lie,' I told her.

‘He isn't lying. He believes it. But it's only a legend. It's a matter of faith, not historical truth.'

‘Yet he calls them
false
gods,' I reminded her. ‘He's not that credulous.'

‘Remember what he said about the language lying,' she said, in a last desperate appeal to her brand of reason. ‘The absurdity must be coming out of the translation. We don't really know what he's saying.'

‘I know what he's saying,' I said.

‘We'd have found traces,' she insisted. ‘You can't possibly believe that a starfaring people came to this world, colonised it, and then abandoned their children to degeneracy and wiped out all traces of any civilisation.'

‘That depends,' I mused, ‘on when. When did they come here? Where did they go? It might have been millions of years ago. We've always assumed that the Gallacellans were the first. Then us. Then the Khor-monsa. All within the space of a few thousand years. No older race ever tried to colonise. They were all content to stay at home, like ninety-nine out of every hundred even today. But there's no reason to assume there haven't been a hundred or a thousand other interstellar cultures.'

‘Where are they now?'

‘That,' I told her, ‘is an entirely different order of question.'

‘You can't ignore it like that.'

‘No more can you ignore the fact that the woman we're looking for has behaved in a way which is totally alien to your idea of the Anacaona. She's committed crimes. There must be a reason for that. There must be a reason why she came back here. There's something important involved here, and I'm not content to clear up this mess without finding out what it is. Perhaps you are. For a supposed expert on the Anacaona you're surprisingly content with your ignorance. But I care. I want to know what I'm doing. I tried to help that girl once, now I'm trying to do it again. I didn't know what was happening last time—this time I'm damned if I'll let it go without trying to find out. No one else here seems the least bit interested in what's happened to that girl. The Anacaona have absorbed a great deal of your culture and your thought and your way of doing things, but I think you've been affected by them, too. Not in an imitative way, but affected nevertheless. You're content to let things be so long as they work to your advantage. You couldn't understand them, and in the end they've led you to give up
trying
to understand. Not just them—everything. I guess the
Zodiac
generations gave your people a long head start in being small-minded, but you're sure as hell making no attempt to expand again. The only thing you want to grow is the quantity of sacred soil that you can plant your footprints on. I don't think I ever met two people who didn't give a damn about as much as you and Max.'